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In fact, England is, I believe, the only European country where private enterprise has pursued sylviculture on a really great scale, though admirable examples have been set in many others.
In England, France, and Germany, where every corner of soil is occupied, and the least bit of ground is sold at a high price, but where labor and capital are comparatively cheap is wisest to employ INTENSIVE cultivation. ... All the efforts of the cultivator ought to be directed to the obtaining of a given result with the least sacrifice, and there is equally a loss to the commonwealth if the application of improved agricultural processes be neglected where they are advantageous, or if they be employed where they are not required. ... In this point of view, sylviculture must follow the same laws as agriculture, and, like it, be modified according to the economical conditions of different states.
Besides this, all trees, whether grown for fruit, for fuel, or for timber, require more or less training in order to yield the best returns. The experiments of the Vicomte de Courval in sylviculture throw much light on this subject, and show, in a most interesting way, the importance of pruning forest-trees.
Jourdier observes: "Instead of a vast territory with immense forests, which we expect to meet, one sees only scattered groves thinned by the wind or by the axe of the moujik, grounds cut over and more or less recently cleared for cultivation. There is probably not a single district in Russia which has not to deplore the ravages of man or of fire, those two great enemies of Muscovite sylviculture.
In England, however, arboriculture, the planting and nursing of single trees, has, until comparatively recent times, been better understood than sylviculture, the sowing and training of the forest.
A full discussion of the methods of sylviculture would, indeed, be out of place in a work like the present, but the want of conveniently accessible means of information on the subject, in the United States, will justify me in presenting it with somewhat more of detail than would otherwise be pertinent.
The objects of the restoration of the forest are as multifarious as the motives that have led to its destruction, and as the evils which that destruction has occasioned. The Economy of the Forest. The legislation of European states upon sylviculture, and the practice of that art, divide themselves into two great branches the preservation of existing forests, and the creation of new.
On this latter branch of the subject, the management of the primitive wood, experience and observation have not yet collected a sufficient stock of facts to serve for the construction of a complete system of this department of sylviculture; but the government of the forest as it exists in France the different zones and climates of which country present many points of analogy with those of the United States and of some of the British colonies has been carefully studied, and several manuals of practice have been prepared for the foresters of that empire.
The prairies have never been wooded, so far as we know their history, and it has been contended that successful sylviculture would be impracticable in those regions from the want of rain. Climatic conditions more or less resembling those of our Western territories produce analogous effects in India.
These animals browse upon the terminal buds and the tender branches, thereby stunting, if they do not kill, the young trees, and depriving them of all beauty and vigor of growth. Forest Fires. All the treatises on sylviculture are full of narratives of forest fires.
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